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Today I read a cool article about how feasible the Fallout games are. Check it out here. Anyway, when I was done with the article I came to the comments and immediately saw this gem:

I actually never got into Fallout, simply because of their rampant abuse of evil chemical drugs – its a big turnoff to me.

Disgusting game.

Wow. Yeah, because no one in reality ever used any drugs. The hilarious part is that this person has 420 in the username, which makes it painfully obvious why it is particularly “chemical” drugs that are evil. Because “natural” drugs are completely harmless. Yeah. Also, saying that Fallout rampantly abuses drugs is about the same as saying that Mass Effect contains graphic sex that the player can control.

I’m fine with people calling the game disgusting, but I would expect them to call it that because you can blow people heads off in a very graphic fashion. But drugs? Fuck off.

I just finished a session with my Xbox 360. First time in about a week that I sat down and actually played something. Busy week. I played three games. Call of Duty: Black Ops, Outland and Peggle. Let me comment on each of them.

Peggle. Plowed through the Peggle Nights expansion’s adventure mode and I am officially done with that game. Electronic crack and I’m staying far away from it. Fun while it lasted.

Outland. Just tried the XBLA trial and bought it on the spot after that run. Didn’t play it anymore after I bought it, but my initial impressions are that it’s a cross between Castlevania, Ikaruga, Braid and Limbo. Four games that I loooooove. Outland’s ambiance and general feeling is just fucking awesome and I want to play it more soon!

BlOps. Fucking. Sucks. Call of Duty is a game series that has been tiresome ever since I started playing World at War. I don’t think I finished the first level of that game. I barely pushed through the campaign of Modern Warfare 2 as it was a very frustrating experience, same as World at War. I played through a couple of levels of Black Ops tonight and it’s the exact same thing as all the other games. Knock your head against the wall over and over and over again until you bleed. You enter a scene and you have X amount of checkpoints to get through. Each checkpoint has enemies attacking you in droves and the game’s supporting characters are screaming at you to haul ass. Well, if you haul ass and hurry up, you will get shot to bits and restart at the latest checkpoint. Most of the time you won’t even know who killed you and you won’t have a chance at dodging the bullet, grenade, exploding car or whatever else is killing you. You just go back to the drawing board and try something else, most of the time you lower your pace, which results in more annoying screams from your AI pals. Well, you know what? I’m tired of this concept. It’s outdated and tiresome and it doesn’t matter one bit if your game has the most impressive graphics ever, because the game still sucks. I’m done with the CoD games.

I’ve been reading a lot of gaming blogs this year and if there is one game that has gotten waaaaaay too much hype, it’s Singularity. Weirdly enough, it began as an under the radar game because Activision stripped it completely of promotion budget. Then as the year went on people started a word of mouth type of movement, saying that it’s the most underrated game of the year. It took on, in my opinion at least, gigantic proportions, leading to a hype campaign that made the game impossible to still be under the radar. It turned into sheer hype.

Since the game doesn’t deserve that hype, it has became overrated. Vastly so. And let me tell you why.

It’s just not that good. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely not very good. It’s mediocre in almost every way.

– The graphics are bland and dated. It’s gray spliced with some gray and then some more gray. You also have some brown in there. The geometry reminds me of ooooooold shooters and the character models are just… you get the picture.

– The sound didn’t do anything for me in my surround system and the voice actors are pitifully stereotypical.

– The writing is a joke because it’s all over the place. It’s like the game can’t decide if it’s going with a poignant and serious tone or if it’s a comedy. The narrative is also all over the place, because the audio diaries that are there try to emulate what’s been done several times before in the System Shock and BioShock games, but they fail horribly. Singularity doesn’t have any explorative freedom, which was what made the audio diaries so eerie in those games. It’s not used in the same smart way in Singularity.

– The weapons are, with one exception, incredibly boring. The Seeker was an interesting take on the sniper rifle, but the rest of them were so meh I don’t even know where to begin. The setting is a research paradise turned bad, so the potential for all sorts of interesting and creative weapons was definitely there, but Raven Software pissed that opportunity away.

– The enemies are annoying and, with one exception, don’t take advantage of the time travel aspect of the game. That makes the collection of enemies boring and bland.

– The Time Manipulation Device (TMD) is the selling point of the game and it’s woefully underused. You use it, alright, and you use it often, but that’s not what I mean. It’s just another weapon for you. You point at enemies and hyper-age them to death. People will say that “oh, but you use it for puzzles as well!” but fuck you all if you bring that up. Fixing a broken staircase doesn’t count. The idea of time manipulation isn’t used properly. It never wows me and it never really makes me think out of the box. That’s what it should do if it’s a goddamn selling point for the game. The TMD just becomes your fallback plan if you’re low on ammo or something. You shoot two or three enemies and there’s a bit of pressure on you, so instead of reloading the rifle, which would take some time, you resort to your make-enemies-older-by-pointing-at-them device so you get some breathing space. It’s just not used properly.

Bottom line, it’s merely an okay game, not the blow-your-socks-off game of 2010. I get that Activision and Bobby Kotick killed all the promotion for the game and that made it kind of come out of nowhere, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the best surprise of 2011. A game on the level of Army of Two doesn’t get that distinction. It’s full of broken promises and mediocrity. It had so much potential that it didn’t use, instead leaving it to be boring and bland. People compare it to BioShock all the time and the people who do that are all stupid, or they just have a very bleak memory of BioShock. BioShock was a narrative masterpiece, the weapons were creative, the plasmids were creative, Rapture was a masterfully created character in itself, you were actually scared of the big daddies and the twists and turns of the storyline were awesome. Singularity doesn’t have ANYTHING that comes to the level of BioShock. Nothing. In fact, Bioshock looks and plays better than Singularity and it’s a game that is several years older.

So stop promoting this game, saying that people should play it. It’s bland and boring and it’s a waste of time. The only reason I played it was because I wanted to get something for what I paid for it.

I just watched a video review of the game God of War 3 by the talentless hack The Irate Gamer. I watch him just so I can get annoyed by him, because that’s fun too. But this post isn’t mainly about him, although he thoroughly sucks. No, it’s about something he said in the review. It reflects on the entire entertainment industry in the US. Here’s a quote:

“now let me preface by saying that this game is NOT intended for kids since it includes harsh language, nudity and a scene of Kratos getting it on with goddess Aphrodite”

It’s not for kids because of harsh language and sexuality. Not once does he mention the gruesome violence and ubiquitous blood being bad for kids. That’s something I will NEVER understand about the Yankee entertainment industry. Over here in Europe we put a stamp of age restriction on something if it has explicit violence. Nudity? Hell no! Why? BECAUSE THE HUMAN BODY ISN’T DANGEROUS! The naked human body is just about the most natural thing in the world for us humans, so why would seeing it hurt kids? It’s ridiculous. But it’s ooooookay to show Kratos ripping limbs off of bodies and whatnot. Yeah, that’s the most natural thing in the world.

Just another reason why the US is considered generally stupid by us Europeans.

I like to sing and a lot of the time I get my guitar out to play and sing along to some songs here in front of the computer. I don’t have my guitar here right now, but I was singing along to Julian Velard’s song that I posted the other day. I decided that I want to sing along while looking up the lyrics because I don’t want to mumble through the passages I haven’t learned yet.

So there I am singing along and I get to the bridge at about 1:50 into the song. Go ahead and start the video and get to that part just to see how fucked up this is. I googled the song’s lyrics and got one single result. Here’s what that site suggests that the lyrics to the bridge are:

Pitch a tent and pay the bills
gone to man of magic seals
the moon is full the sun explodes then you let the door alone
with photographs a lonely mess i swear im never going down.

Now, if you’ve started the video and listened to that part, you hear that those aren’t the lyrics. AT ALL!

The thing is, someone is posting these lyrics on the sites and there’s no real verification system going on. It’s not the first time that a song gets the wrong lyrics on some random site like AZlyrics or whatever.

There’s even a site for it. Just go to Kissthisguy.com and they have a huge archive of common misheard lyrics. Some of the examples are pretty funny actually.

But in this case, Love Again For The First Time, those are SO not the words that Julian is singing. How high/drunk/deaf/stupid do you have to be to miss something by such a big margin? It’s fascinating, really. Oh well…

Right now I have a glass of wine that I want to finish and while I do that, I’ll play some poker. Three tables or something. I’ll have a movie in the background, probably one of my favorites: Definitely Maybe. Then it’s time for bed. Good times tonight, barbeque and stuff.

Summer hiatus is now over. Still have some stuff to take care of but no need to let that get in the way of writing that I really want to do. So! What have I got in store for you? The Top 300 Games list will, of course, keep going, probably later today. But first! First I have this little diddy for you. Here it is!

I check a few news sites daily and on one of them, Sweden’s biggest news site Aftonbladet, they have a sidebar with a bunch of stories. In the last year or so, they’ve started putting advertisements there, almost masquerading as news stories. They have a different color and it says “ad” or something next to it, but if you’re really fast, you don’t get that it’s not a proper news story. Not that most of the stories on that site are proper news stories… it’s become more of a tabloid than a real newspaper, but what the hell…

One of the ads that are featured on there says something like “Lottery winner bought breast augmentations for her and her sisters”. I clicked it and I figured, hey, why not try to find pictures of these girls. They might look nice! So I google a bit and find a British forum that mention these girls, referencing what seems to be the original news article in some random local newspaper. Anyway, that’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting is the date that the forum post was made. January 31st in 2006. Four and a half years ago! And now this Swedish “newspaper” is running the ad (for the betting site Nordicbet btw) like it’s news. Just how desperate for exposure and clicks are these people?

Yes, of course. Elected Democrats held a rally in New York, calling for the “terrorists” who organized the Ship to Gaza flotilla to be banned from the US so they can’t get into the country. They want visas to be denied and all that jazz. I love how they call aid workers terrorists and how a humanitarian aid effort is somehow a terrorist action. Goddamn idiots.